I’m excited to announce Sketchpad 4.0! The focuses on this release has making the app more colorful, faster, and easier to use.

Here’s an overview of what’s new:

Stroke/Fill is available on all brushes.

VectorFill replaces Floodfill for crisper edges and much faster rendering! This can lead to some fun by importing an SVG into Sketchpad, re-coloring it, and download it back as an SVG (right click to download!).

Linear gradient editor

Radial gradient editor

Text updates with special thanks to OpenType.js & some inspiration from FitText! Editing text now feels very smooth. Additionally these new features are available:

Font Size is automatically set based on textarea dimensions

Bold, Italic, Underline & Stroke styles

Align Left, Center, Right & Justify

Line Height & Letter Spacing

Crop has been merged with the Resize tool making life simpler. What’s better the crop tool now automatically zooms your viewport to fit so you can see your entire document while cropping.

Your library view has been updated with a more robust & spacious interface, along with more obvious buttons for renaming, duplicating, and removing documents.

High-res export now works on all tool and style combinations!

New auto-save UI allows you to disable the ‘auto-saving’ feature. This is helpful especially on large documents with thousands of layers that may take awhile to autosave. Although, to that end, auto-saving is much faster in the new version.

And finally you’ll find an export button right on the toolbar for all those who requested it!

Special thanks to jsondiffpatch which is now used in Sketchpad’s history.

There are a couple things that could not be 100% converted to the new version Sketchpad. You may want to consider whether these matter to you before upgrading your files (you will be prompted). My apologies for any inconvenience these may cause you:

FloodFill was depreciated. It just did not make sense to keep in. It cost too much to maintain, it was notorious for crashing users browsers. Sketchpad is a vector app, so a bitmap FloodFill never made sense. The new VectorFill replaces the FloodFill, and the results are much nicer!

LinearGradient format needed to be upgraded in order support the new Gradient Editor, in doing so LinearGradients may shift slightly.

Sketchpad has been used in applications from scientific machine learning, to kids drawing, but we haven’t had much chance to focus on any commercial aspects. This is why we’re excited to be changing that. We’re gearing up to provide the technology that makes your users product customization experience quick and easy by tapping into our experience + codebase in building Sketchpad.

One of the many features we’re creating to push the envelope is instant previews of customized products—there is no more need to upload the artwork, process the preview on the server, and then download once again, this can all be done in milliseconds in the browser.

We’re looking for partners who own print companies, with websites that are in the need of automation and HTML5 goodness. Connect with us—https://sketch.io/contact.html